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The former Ford plant in east-end Toronto once lured workers from across the city with the promise of solid, middle class jobs assembling Model A cars. Almost a century later, even the hope of low-wage, part-time employment is fast evaporating as Target, the building’s current major tenant, shuts its doors.

Shoppers World Mall was once the location of a Ford auto plant and has been reinvented many times since. (Colin McConnell / Toronto Star)

The Crescent Town area was the home of actress Shirley Douglas in the late 1970s. (Colin McConnell / Toronto Star)

Middle class bungalows are giving way to impressive three story homes. (Colin McConnell / Toronto Star)

The Ford Assembly Plant on Danforth Avenue under construction in 1923. It was designed by Albert Kahn, the foremost industrial architect of his day. (City of Toronto Archives)

Ad in the Toronto Daily Star, Tuesday May 15th 1962

The hulking mega plaza may, however, be in for another transformation.

Local residents are coming together in the hopes of transforming the old plant floor into an engine of innovation once more — this time, in the form of a social enterprise to combat the neighborhood’s growing income inequality.

“With the closure of (Target) we’ve kind of reached rock bottom here,” says NDP MP Matthew Kellway, who represents the community of Beaches-East York and is leading efforts to brainstorm a new future for the soon-to-be-vacant space.

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“The biggest need for this community in this neighbourhood is employment for sure. And a big number of community members, they are newcomers. So they are looking for employment opportunities,” said neighbourhood resident Rezwan Karim.

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Rewind to 1923, when Ford Canada built its assembly plant in what was then the pastoral east end. The newly extended eastbound streetcar line filled every morning with workers heading for factories. Jobs with Ford, according to noted auto historian James C. Mays, were the gold standard. Less than a decade earlier, the company had instituted an 8-hour work day and a $4 a day wage in Canada, extended to all employees regardless of race.

“That made them the highest paid factory workers in the entire British Empire,” says Mays.

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But by the middle of the century, urban industry had fallen out of vogue. The plant, purchased a decade earlier by Nash Motors, was exchanged for a piece of land in Brampton in what Mays calls a “straight swap, no cash” with mining company turned real-estate developer Peel-Elder Ltd. In May 1962, an ad in the Toronto Daily Star heralded the arrival of “the world’s largest, all-electrically heated and air-conditioned mall” where patrons could experience a “truly new world in shopping pleasure!”

Shopper’s World was born.

The bold new paean to consumerism ushered in a whole new kind of economy. It was a Canadian affair, anchored by retail giants like Eaton’s, Zellers, and the country’s first Shoppers Drug Mart. But the side effect, says local historian Stephen Wickens, was a crippled local economy that lost not just its industrial engine but business from its main street.

The subsequent retail opportunities were of poorer quality, adds Kendra Coulter, a Professor of Labour Studies at Brock University. Nonetheless, she says, the work was still more likely to be of a stable, full time nature. Post-secondary education and childcare were more affordable, meaning that even the new waves of lower-wage retail employees could hang on to a middle-class existence.

Shirley Douglas, the actress and daughter of Medicare founder Tommy Douglas, moved into the nearby Crescent Town apartment blocks in the late 1970s. She describes it as a “marvelous” mixed-income community - but one teetering on a precipice. The businesses serving Crescent Town were drying up, and Shopper’s World was swift becoming “the only place to go unless you wanted to go downtown.” She recalls seeing “endless miles of young men and women” in the area, all increasingly pessimistic about their future.

“It’s the first place I saw what was happening in this country with the depression,” she says.

Today, inequality is palpable in the Crescent Town neighbourhood: the tower blocks Douglas once called home are now run down, and middle class bungalows are giving way to impressive three story homes. Meanwhile, the area has a 16 per cent unemployment rate and 35 per cent of its residents are low income. A Wellesley-Institute funded study of the east-end found that around a quarter of locals were surviving on casual and part time work.

Since March 2013, up to 200 such jobs have been supplied by Target, the current blockbuster tenant at Shopper’s World whose just-in-time employment model has come to epitomize precarious work. From the corner of Danforth and Victoria Park, this Target boasted the largest volume of sales in Canada. Soon it will be gone, and the next episode in the old auto plant’s life will be up for grabs.

Enter a new community group formed in March by Kellway. The group is meeting to discuss how the space could be put to better use. Social enterprise expert Ryan Turnbull, who is advising the team, says the sprawling space is ripe with possibility.

“One of the potential solutions could be of food insecurity challenges that exist within the community. A facility that large could be used to grow food. It could be used as a public market place. It could be used for renewable energy generation.”

An urban agriculture project, for example, would allow residents to grow food locally and also generate income by selling to restaurants or nearby grocery stores.

There is precedent for such initiatives in places like Chicago, where industrial relics have been turned into commercially viable local agriculture projects. Other ideas touted by Kellway’s group include turning Target’s formidable floor space into a training centre funneling underemployed locals into needy sectors.

For Karim, a member of the group who has lived in the area for 7 years, the idea of a business that gives back is vital for an area where good jobs have been disappearing for decades.

“A social enterprise can benefit both people - those who are running it, and those who are living in this neighbourhood. It’s win-win.”

How the old auto plant reinvents itself still largely depends on what happens to the building’s lease in May. There are already whispers of a new Walmart moving in – a welcome development for some locals, but not quite the successor these activists envision.

“As a community, how…can we build some kind of economic enterprise to respond to the needs of this community rather than continue to be vulnerable to a precarious economy that doesn’t seem to be serving people well,” said Kellway.

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